Day 2 (Nov 16) — Still no luggage….

November 16, 2017

So here we are on St. Barts on day 2 and still no luggage… We drove to the airport to check the status and were told that our luggage is now on St. Martin. We can see St. Martin from our QTH, it’s only a 10-minute flight. However, we were told there was no guarantee that they’ll be here tomorrow. The St. Barts airport was full of angry and upset tourists like us who paid a lot of money to spend a vacation on this island, only to be left without any luggage. Not a happy crowd…

Today we cobbled up another antenna and managed to get on a second band (18 MHz). We found a small spool of wire and put up a dipole at about 10 ft (3m). With a big downslope to the north and west, it was enough to work Europe and the US and a few Pacific stations. However, the band is now dead so we’re left once again with just 10 Mhz for the night.

Our home made 17m dipole

We are uploading our logs to Club Log but unfortunately the QSO Director software is on one of the computers in our delayed baggage, along with antennas and radios for the other bands. We’re happy to at least be putting out some kind of signal from TO2SP.

With any luck, we’ll get our luggage tomorrow and have enough daylight left to put up more antennas. If not, we’ll continue to work 10 MHz.